Red Zone Son

Chapter 18

Solomon was more on edge than usual when they went into the park later that morning. The dumbphone in his pocket felt like a sound grenade. Manal, on the other hand, either didn’t care about Wilson’s visit or was just better at hiding it. She seemed like her usual self, smiling, laughing, and eagerly pulling on his arm to try one ride after another. If she hadn’t mentioned how sad she was that they had to go home soon, he wouldn’t have guessed it was probably their last day together.

But maybe that was just her maintaining her cover, because Solomon wasn’t sure either of them were going back to the red zone. Or maybe she was, and he wasn’t, or maybe he was, and she wasn’t, he didn’t know. He wished he did. But all he did know, as they sat in a roller coaster car climbing up a steel track to where it would drop them down at a 97-degree angle, was that things were about to change.

They were at the top and about to descend when Solomon heard the phone chime once. He had to make a split-second decision: should he try to open it on the ride while they were screaming down the inverted slope, or wait until they reached the bottom? His training urged him to immediately take out his phone, to obey without hesitation, but he could vividly picture the phone flying out of his hand and shattering on the pavement below.

Their train was tipping over the slope, but it hadn’t yet gained much acceleration. Solomon reached into his pocket, grabbed the phone, pulled it out, and opened the message. He wrapped his fingers around the bottom half of the phone to maintain a good grip. This meant he wouldn’t be able to respond to any messages on the ride, but he could at least read whatever Wilson had sent him. Now they were hurtling down at seventy-five miles per hour, and he was holding the phone against his knees to steady it, trying to read the screen from around his safety harness.

run get her back to red

The wind was roaring in his ears, the world blurring around him as they hurtled down the track. His stomach was rising into his throat, as if he’d just jumped out of the plane again. Get her back to red, get Manal back to the red zone, man, if Wilson wasn’t bothering to even use a code word that meant the message was urgent, extremely urgent. Was he trapped? Someone closing in on him? Yes, had to be, this was the kind of message you squeezed out when you only had seconds to spare. And the fact that Wilson was telling him to get her all the way back to the red zone and not just to hide out confirmed another thought Solomon had had for some time: Manal was a key figure in the red zone spy network here, a hub, and not a small one. She couldn’t get caught.

He had to warn her. She was sitting next to him. He could barely hear her laughing; she had no idea. But it was impossible to talk on most of these roller coasters. “Manal!” he shouted over the rush of the wind and the screams of the thrill-seekers around them. “Listen to me! I have to get you back, now!”

Her eyes widened as she turned to face him. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped her safety harness. But they were about to go upside down now, into a loop, and Solomon couldn’t help but feel paranoid that someone was going to take a shot at them as they hung there, stuck inside their seats, Manal’s hair flailing in the rushing wind. Then they did a twist, and yet another climb and another dive, and he was starting to feel that this roller coaster ride was the longest ride in the world until finally, finally, they were racing toward the braking zone.

Solomon got himself ready to run; when they came to a jolting halt he unfastened his safety harness at once. He was on the platform before any staff members could say anything. Manal was out of her seat a second later, and without hesitation he grabbed her hand and yanked her onto the platform. People were starting to stare but he made a beeline for the exit, not quite but almost dragging Manal along with him.

Finally, they burst out into the main area of the park. He was scanning the surroundings for anyone approaching them, anyone looking at them, anyone near them at all. He put his hands on Manal’s shoulders to hurry her forward, but she slipped out of his grasp, took his hand, and pulled him down so she could whisper into his ear. “Slow down,” she murmured. “We can’t run. They’ll pick us out if we run.”

She was right. At the same time, it was agonizing to limit himself to what felt like a crawling pace. Every corner had Solomon reaching for his pistol underneath his long-sleeved zip-up. That was when he heard it: the distinct sound of an explosion behind and beneath them. His hand was immediately on his pistol’s grip, he was a moment away from pulling it out of his holster shirt, when he heard another sharp, cracking sound, less reverberating, less forceful, than the first. He saw a park employee behind a nearby concession stand turn her head to look up at the sky. “Fireworks?” she said. “In the middle of the day?”

She wasn’t the only one to notice them. In the morning people at the park were usually more spread out but when another bang and whistle in the sky went off, Solomon saw a couple peel off from the log ride line they had been waiting in, and a kid wearing a blue baseball cap get up from a bench with his hookah stick to join the crowd that had started to cluster around them.

Solomon exchanged a glance with Manal. She didn’t look worried, but she stepped closer to him. Another firecracker went off, and the crowd began to grow faster than he liked, much faster. He let go of his pistol and put his arm around Manal, and started trying to force a way through for both of them. They were the only ones trying to go out toward the park’s perimeter. Everyone else was heading into the park to get a better view of the fireworks.

Should I stop pushing and go with the flow? he wondered. Would that make us less visible to whoever is setting off firecrackers in what’s an obvious attempt to cover up the explosion? No, I’m going to keep going and get Manal out. I don’t want us to get sucked deeper into the park and get trapped.

The people around them were pushing against them in every direction though; Solomon had to shove by blue-baseball-cap boy. He didn’t like how packed in Manal and he were. He didn’t like how every step they took bumped them up against a dozen people, any of whom could be concealing a weapon. He felt Manal flinch every time the fireworks went off above them. “Excuse me, sorry,” she kept saying to the people they were pushing past. “Family emergency came up, so sorry.”

By the time they were at the entrance plaza and out of the park Solomon was sweating and tense as a live wire. Nobody was around them inside the plaza, which was somewhat of a relief, but that also meant they stuck out like a sore thumb. He scanned the trimmed bushes in case someone was hiding beneath them. Manal turned to him. “What’s going on?”

Solomon explained as quickly as he could as they made their way along the paved pathways past benches and lampposts. Manal grew angrier with each word. “I told him he wasn’t making good decisions,” she hissed. “I told him and told him, and now he’s caught, I know he’s caught, and everyone with him!”

“How many were with him?” Solomon asked, his heart sinking, his thoughts turning at once to Rithvik.

“Eight. And don’t you even consider going to the safe house, the antifas turn our safe houses into prisons to try and trap anyone attempting rescues.”

It was clear Manal didn’t want him going back for anyone, but Solomon didn’t know if he’d be able to stop himself. And if he were going to go for it, he needed more information. “What were they doing here?”

“I’m not telling you anything that the blue zone operatives don’t already have at this point, but we were verifying whether or not this amusement park is a front for a weapons depot, which it is. I told Wade to send a drone in and take some pictures and be done with it but he insisted on setting the entire place up for a search-and-destroy mission and managed to convince some higher-ups to go along with him.”

All of this was above his pay grade, although he did feel a weapons depot only a few miles away from the Susquehanna was a little too close to the red zone for comfort. But that wasn’t his focus right now. They were out of the park and on the road. There was a walking trail in addition to a bike path alongside every street in the blue zone, it was what they’d used to get to their hotel since he hadn’t wanted anyone driving them, but they weren’t going back to the hotel now. “I need to get you across back to the red zone,” he said. “Can you swim?”

“Yes.”

“Could you swim across the Susquehanna?”

Manal fell silent. She was thinking, Solomon could tell. Doing math, calculating her own strength and ability and assessing it against the force of the river’s currents, measuring whether she could cross quickly enough to avoid getting shot at. After a minute, she shook her head. “No, I can’t do it on my own. Especially not if I have to stay underwater the entire mile, which I would have to, in order to cross safely. But I know where some equipment is that’ll close the gap. Come, follow me.”

It was broad daylight and sunny out. Solomon felt extremely exposed as Manal led him off the road into a broad expanse of green grass that apparently served as a cross-country racecourse, according to the posted signs. Manal didn’t seem to be worried about trespassing, so he followed her without comment. She led him through it, then onto a walking trail that they stayed on for a long time, cars and the occasional bike moving past them. There were a few people on the walking trail back behind them which made him want to take more turns, to shake off any pursuit, but by now it was past noon and he didn’t know how much longer Manal could keep going. They hadn’t eaten or drank anything since they’d left the hotel room that morning, not even water since they’d checked in their bottles to the desk before their last ride. So he kept looking over his shoulder instead.

When Manal at one point had them take a sharp left, though and then another left immediately after, Solomon took his chance and pulled her down to duck between two parked cars. He waited, listening for the sound of hurried footsteps on crushed recycled concrete. He heard them soon enough. He still didn’t know for sure if it was someone following them or someone randomly taking that same first left turn as them, but he waited until the footsteps were well out of hearing before standing back upright.

Manal looked drawn. “This way,” she whispered. They continued down a few side streets until they got to a camping ground parking lot. When they went into the campground office he wanted to buy water from the man behind the desk but he didn’t want to use the AR visor since that would pin them to their location, so he waited.

“I’d like my key to Cabin D4,” Manal said.

The man went to the pegboard behind him and pulled an old-fashioned metal key off a hook. A sign above the board said, “Welcome to Old Times.” Underneath, it said, “Indigenous-owned, trans female-owned.” When the man handed the key to Manal without comment, Solomon glanced at her. Maybe she’d already had this place rented? Or was the man also part of her underground network? Manal left without saying anything further to the man, which made him think it was the latter.

Outside there were six cabins, set up not in rows but around a grassy commons in a vaguely hexagonal shape. In the center of the commons was a bioethanol-style fire pit, with several blue zone citizens gathered around it, barbecuing short strips of pork that looked and smelled like samgyupsal to Solomon. They had to go past them to get to Cabin D4. They were at the cabin door when Manal turned to whisper to him, “Can you make sure it’s clear inside?”

Which of course, was at the exact same time that one of the campers near the pit called out, “Hey, you folks are new, right?”

Manal turned around to face them, all smiles. Solomon was able to not glower, but that was about it. Of all the times to run into friendly civilians! He hoped that was all they were, at least. He couldn’t tell whether Manal seemed to think so or not; she was responding to them, laughing, both of them standing on the small front porch of the tiny log cabin that she had just asked him to clear.

He was impressed she’d thought to ask him to instead of just barging in. He decided not to tell her that in drills they’d only ever done room clearing in a team, and armed usually with more than just a pistol. Besides, knowing Manal was relying on him for her safety burned away his hesitation. So while he waited, as unglowering as he could, for Manal to finish putting off the blue zoners, he sized up the cabin as best as he was able to from the outside. It looked as if it were about the size of their hotel room, so it wouldn’t take him too much time to clear. Come on, come on, come on… It didn’t help that he was hungry and that the samgyupsal sizzling on the grill pan smelled amazing. “Want to join us?” one of the campers was asking Manal.

“I’m so sorry, we actually have a family emergency, we just came in to grab a few things and then we have to head straight to the hospital,” Manal replied, and they responded with all the right noises of course, you have to go, sorry for keeping you. Finally she turned back to Solomon. Her hands were trembling as she unlocked the door which he thought was a bad sign. He wished he could pull out his pistol before going in but he couldn’t wave a weapon around in front of the campers so he braced himself, entered and unholstered at the same time.

Kitchenette, clear. Attached bedroom space, clear. Bathroom, clear. Everything was clean and nothing looked rifled through. The smart fridge and smart microwave shone as if they’d been wiped down with a chemrag. Nobody else was inside. He checked behind the front door one last time, noticed that it was smart as well, then gave Manal the go-ahead.

She slammed the front door shut and ran for the bedroom. She started to pull off the queen-size mattress and he moved to help her. Underneath it was a large box in the form and shape of a box spring. There was a split down the middle, like a gap between two doors, and a number pad on the right-hand side of the split. Manal knew he was watching but didn’t ask him to look away, so he memorized the numbers she punched in: 4233791.

The doors unlocked with a click. Manal struggled for a second to open them, so he moved again to help. He wanted to kiss her when he saw the contents. Water bottles, stacks of MREs, civilian clothes, gas masks and more weapons than he’d seen for a week. And at the very bottom, next to flippers and other scuba gear, was a cylindrical torpedo-shaped object about the length of his forearm.

“It’s a subscooter,” she said; then, seeing his puzzlement added, “An underwater propulsion device.”

Solomon double checked to make sure the cabin door was locked, then he made Manal sit down at the table in the kitchenette to drink some water. He was about to cut open an MRE pouch and microwave it but she shook her head. “We don’t have time to eat. The guy at the campground office not saying anything to me when I asked for the key, that was a pre-set code, it means he detected someone accessing this cabin’s network. Whoever it is will find out soon enough that we opened the door. We’ve got maybe five minutes here before we have to leave.”

Five minutes, okay. Solomon sat down across from Manal and began reviewing, out loud, as quickly as he could, what he’d learned in training about the security on the blue zone side of the river. There was no obvious solution. They relied heavily on drones equipped with cameras and sensors. There were radar installations and motion detectors. He remembered learning they even had metal detectors buried underground in a lengthwise miles-long track about two hundred feet off the shore of the Susquehanna. To top it off, there was always at least one human guard per mile patrolling at the river’s edge.

No landmines though. They weren’t environmentally friendly enough.

“The metal detector means we won’t be able to take the propulsion device,” Manal told him after he was done. “It’ll set it off way before we can get it to the river’s edge.”

The metal detector also meant Solomon wouldn’t be able to use any of the weapons in the armory unless some of them were customized polymer pieces. But even as he realized this, he had an idea. “What if I tackle the guard first? Then you run and get the device into the water and go while I’m engaging him?”

“Only I’ll be able to get across then.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

Manal’s eyes were bright, as if she were holding back tears. She reached out across the table and grasped Solomon’s sleeve, the fabric bunching up in her hand. Nobody was around them, and they weren’t undercover. She wasn’t pretending anything. “You’ll get caught,” she pleaded.

He put his hand over hers and said, as gently as he could, “Well, it’s a good thing I don’t know anything, then.”

Manal shook her head. “If you get caught,” she whispered, “interrogation will be the least of your worries. It might not even happen. They will most likely send you straight to a camp.”

“Tell me where the safe house is,” he replied.

“It’s a trap.”

“I know. But if I don’t get caught at the border, I have to at least try to find out what happened to the others.”

Her grip tightened on his sleeve. “Let’s find another way. A way for both of us to go back.”

For a moment, Solomon was tempted, incredibly tempted, to do just that. What if he did? There were no orders from Wilson for him to stay, to try a rescue attempt or even gather information on what had happened. All Wilson had told him was to get Manal back across to the red zone as quickly as he could. Maybe Solomon could return with her to the red zone. Then he could report on the mission’s failure. He could execute his duty exactly and no more.

He could come home to Adah, as he’d promised he would.

But even as he thought about it, he knew it couldn’t happen. Wilson wouldn’t have told them to run if there hadn’t been an imminent threat closing in on them; he wouldn’t have told Solomon to get Manal back to the red zone unless she was important enough for that. He had to get Manal out, get her out as soon as possible, no matter the cost to him.

Besides, they had Rithvik. Maybe it was boot camp training kicking in, maybe it was those eight weeks of not being able to go anywhere without him, but Solomon felt physically compelled to go find him, as if some giant invisible hand was forcing him forward. He thought that was what was happening, at any rate. While stationed at the border, he’d read several articles about the psychology behind basic, the idea that it was designed not only to test you to see how you handled stress, but also designed to break you down as an individual, to force you to see yourself only as part of a group. Even knowing so ahead of time didn’t help you resist, the tactics still worked. Maybe the militia had brainwashed him, maybe they’d hijacked all his natural instincts, but Rithvik especially, he couldn’t leave behind.

“Tell me where the safe house is,” he repeated, and this time, still holding tightly to him, she told him.